If you are a spouse, friend or parent, chances are pretty good that you have had to engage in a courageous conversation at some point. Courageous conversations are those ones that make your stomach knot, that feel uncomfortable, but you realize are necessary for the health of your relationship.

In school settings, I find that many teachers are afflicted with CAS - Conflict Avoidance Syndrome. They avoid courageous conversations, often at huge costs to their students.

Jennifer Abrams book, "Having Hard Conversations," is filled with dozens of very specific ideas for preparing for and engaging in these tough conversations. She writes "While we want to do what is right, we also want to have everything stay OK between us and the other person."

These competing commitments usually lead to inaction. She suggests asking ourselves "What is stopping me from having this hard conversation?"

Depending on your answer, Abrams offers tips. My favorite is"Give yourself a time limit for planning the conversation and a deadline for having it. Don't allow yourself to make the hard conversation more important than it needs to be."

I have shared about ThingLink in the past - a free creation tool that allows the user to embed links into an image of his or her choosing. It is an easy to use tool for students, even at the elementary level. Students can create thinglinks that take their viewers to more in-depth information in unlimited ways:

a travel brochure

animal research project

biography

book report

global issues

food chain

After using it for more than a year, it dawned on me thatit can also be used for flipped learning. Instead of giving students a list of web links to navigate for homework or a video to watch, create a thinglink with relevant content links to explore. (This works especially well if you are about to teach students how to create with thinglink. Assign one for homework that tells them about thinglink! Here's an example.) Varying flipped instruction adds a bit of novelty that many students need to stay engaged.